Pubblicato il 21/08/14 ed aggiornato il

En Plein Air painting style

En Plein Air painting, in its strictest sense, the practice of painting landscape pictures out-of-doors; more loosely, the achievement of an intense impression of the open air (French: plein air) in a landscape painting.
Until the time of the painters of the Barbizon school in mid-19th-century France, it was normal practice to execute rough sketches of landscape subjects in the open air and produce finished paintings in the studio. Part of this was a matter of convenience. Before the invention of the collapsible tin paint tube, widely marketed by the colour merchants Winsor Newton in 1841, painters purchased their colours in the form of ground pigment and mixed them fresh with an appropriate medium such as oil.

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819)

The new tubes filled with prepared colours, as well as the invention of a lightweight, portable easel a decade later, made it much easier to paint out-of-doors. Despite these advances, many of the Barbizon painters continued to create most of their work in the studio; not until the late 1860s, with the work of Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, the leaders of Impressionism, did painting en plein air become more popular.

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819)

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819)

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819)

This change came about from 1881, when Monet, in his efforts to capture the true effects of light on the colour of landscape at any given moment, began to carry several canvases at once into the out-of-doors. On each he began a painting of the same subject at a different time of day; on subsequent days, he continued to work on each canvas in succession as the appropriate light appeared. /Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The Newlyn School in England is considered another major proponent of the technique in the latter 19th century.
It was during this period that the "Box Easel", typically known as the French Box Easel or field easel, was invented. It is uncertain who developed it first, but these highly portable easels, with telescopic legs and built-in paint box and palette, made treks into the forest and up the hillsides less onerous. Still made today, they remain a popular choice even for home use since they fold up to the size of a brief case and thus are easy to store.

In the second half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century in Russia, painters such as Vasily Polenov, Isaac Levitan, Valentin Serov, Konstantin Korovin and I. E. Grabar were known for painting En Plein Air.
American Impressionists, too, such as those of the Old Lyme school, were avid painters En Plein Air. American Impressionist painters noted for this style during this era included, Guy Rose, Robert William Wood, Mary Denil Morgan, John Gamble and Arthur Hill Gilbert.